Regional data for new cases today in England

The 7 English regions 

• London +479 (2.5%) 18,951
• Midlands +409 (3.3%) 12,396
• North West +455 (3.9%) 11,591
• South East +880 (8.6%) 10,214
• North East and Yorkshire +524 (5.1%) 10,210
• East of England +143 (2.3%) 6,232
• South West +196 (5.2%) 3,774

The 10 local areas with the highest cases

1. Birmingham +47 (2.4%) 1,931
2. Hampshire +124 (6.9%) 1,802
3. Kent +113 (6.3%) 1,802
4. Lancashire +60 (3.5%) 1,692
5. Surrey +208 (12.6%) 1,649
6. Essex +27 (1.7%) 1,589
7. Hertfordshire +29 (1.9%) 1,552
8. Sheffield +49 (3.6%) 1,365
9. Cumbria +42 (3.3%) 1,278
10. Brent +26 (2.4%) 1,063

The 10 local areas with the lowest cases

1. Rutland +1 (8.3%) 12
2. Isle of Wight +2 (3.6%) 55
3. Hartlepool +1 (1.3%) 75
4. North East Lincolnshire +5 (6.0%) 84
5. Torbay +2 (1.9%) 103
6. Peterborough +5 (4.6%) 108
7. Herefordshire, County of +9 (7.4%) 122
8. North Somerset +4 (3.2%) 124
9. Bracknell Forest +27 (20.1%) 134
10. North Lincolnshire +12 (8.8%) 136

He is a good friend of Boris'.  Think on that.

Apparently not.  It had been said that Trump was struggling with the pandemic because he couldn't belittle a virus but he's managed to find someone to blame that can't fight back. What's particularly grating is that the things he blames the WHO for are the same as his mistakes but the WHO was reliant on information being provided by China whereas the US had other evidence but Trump chose to ignore it.

Did anyone else hear the news that Trump has demanded that all the welfare cheques being sent out by the federal government must have his name on them? Quite extraordinary but I guess he's desperate to get as much credit as he can, however undeserved.

Well, he thinks he is. But is he?

​Coronavirus: Top doctor urges UK government to consider Korean antibody tests

Quote

 

One of the country's leading doctors is urging the government to follow his antibody testing regime so the country can start working towards a confident lockdown exit strategy. Professor Karol Sikora is using inexpensive, self-administered kits imported from South Korea. The Sugentech kits cost less than £10 each and are widely used in South Korea and Germany - two countries with effective, proven testing regimes.

Thirty staff working at Professor Sikora's private cancer clinic in Reading have been screened to see if they are carrying COVID-19 antibodies using the self-administered kits. He told Sky News: "We're testing the blood of all the staff here for antibodies against coronavirus. There are two types: IGM, which peaks at about 10 days after infection, and IGG, which takes four or five weeks before it peaks. That's the problem with these kits and indeed with all antibody testing, it's the timing and the relationship to the infection. "We know that there are much better assets in the lab that are expensive that need to be sent off and they're better controlled, so we're doing both: the kits which are cheap, less than £7 a kit to do the test, and the more expensive lab tests to validate what we've got from the kits."

 

https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-top-doctor-urges-uk-government-to-consider-korean-antibody-tests-11973742

​

BBC reports this evening that the Royal Navy is really trying to screw things up.letting sailors incubate Covid-19 on board, and then rotating crews so hat the said sailors go home on leave to spread it around.

Googling gives this site but the actual report is buried somewhere in all the other text. It was, however, on the 6pm news. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-52289273

Trump may be intellectually challenged but he more than makes makes up for it with his animal cunning - he has the instincts of a street-fighter and understands that the common man is as dumb - or dumber - than he is, and is motivated by the same base instincts. At the moment he is unstoppable. But as he continues to sack anyone who crosses him and surrounds himself by yes men he is sowing the seeds of his own downfall. It may take time but he will eventually fall under the sheer weight of his incompetence. Unless of course he succeeds in his obvious ambition of overturning the constitution and turning himself into an absolute dictator.  It's just tragic that currently the political opposition in the US has failed to offer up anyone who can match him.

All true. Roger

Well Boris is many things, but he's not totally unhinged.  I can't see how anyone with even a modicum of sanity could think Trump is anything other than a complete maniac !  I should imagine most world leaders laugh at him behind his back.  Didn't Boris get caught doing just that a while ago ?

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-macron-boris-johnson-trudeau-nato-laughing-buckingham-palace-a9231881.html

 I don't see its worth the time, effort and expense as it is only testing whether you have the virus at a particular point in time. E.g not a few weeks ago or a few weeks in the future. 

It certainly itsn't the policy to do random tests on large groups at the moment.

Back of fag packet + google is dangerous but:

668/1767 tested positive but 30% of the tests still to come back so 668/1237 => 54% test positive

30 in hospital => 30/1767 = 1.7% hospitalized

1 in ICU => 1/1767 = 0.06 % in ICU

I am also definitely a medical pleb, but can anything be gleaned from these figures? I would expect spread of the disease to be faster in a confined environment but fewer people to die as the crew will be younger than the general population. It looks like the vessel had been at sea since Jan 21, if you assume that the virus was brought on board at that point, can you get a worst case idea of the speed of the spread of the disease or bounds on R0? Are there historical similar cases of flu or other nasty diseases on ships to give any broad comparisons? How does it compare to cruise ship outbreaks where the passengers would be generally older? If you take a standard model of the disease spread and use it to simulate spread in a closed environment based on some assumptions do you get numbers similar to the ones above? And so on. I have no idea but I would hope cleverer people than me (or maybe the odd journalist?) are asking these questions.

Scaling this up to UK population size would suggest up to a million people eventually needing hospitalization and 36,000 in ICU on ventilators. This is probably invalid though given the different population demographics and environment.

Guinea and Aruba reported their first Covid deaths today

Agree with this. It would provide more information on the current state of the epidemic and stretch the muscles of the testing system which has allegedly been ramped up. I would expect both antigen and antibody testing to be increasingly important in the coming weeks as we try to move out of lockdown. So let's get testing the testing system - or at least the parts of it which are now in place.

Not sure how random testing can be co-ordinated though. Fairly easy to do with healthcare workers and patients but more of a logistical nightmare with the general population.

 That's not a cheery thought to end the day on over here. 

I believe Germany (Bavaria) will start doing this and they will be testing the same group weekly.

Austria used a polling company and a sample of 1500 people and found 0.33% to be infected.

I posted about Prof Karol Sikora twice in this thread today, and Gavin D did further up this page. The article I posted earlier was this:

https://www.wokinghampaper.co.uk/medical-experts-in-shinfield-approve-covid-19-immunity-testing-kit/

Just to pick out part of the text, about the 2 out of 30 of his staff who tested positive:

This gives both hope and concern:

a) A considerable proportion of the population, maybe even a majority, skewed towards younger ages (especially children) cannot contract COVID-19. They can fight off the virus without getting symptoms or even testing positive. This is backed up by other examples of captive populations not catching the virus against the odds, including 80% of the passengers on the Diamond Princess.

b) This will make producing a vaccine difficult, because they could test the vaccine on volunteers, expose them to the virus, or a variant, and find that those volunteers don't catch the virus or get antibodies. But is that because of the virus, or for natural reasons?

c) Doing the kind of antibody testing across a subsection of the population may not prove anything. It may show that a low percentage (<5%) of the population have antibodies, but of the other 95% it won't be possible to know how many are susceptible to the virus, and how many simply can't catch it because of some kind of natural immunity.

Appears to be different on the CDG though. From PFW's post (https://www.theweatheroutlook.com/twocommunity/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1205369#post1205369)

668/1767 tested positive but 30% of the tests still to come back so 668/1237 => 54% test positive

Perhaps one testing stream needs to be this measured approach then, or like the Bavarian approach. Test random samples from each local authority area weekly to get an idea of its prevalence . Would need different people and expertise involved than currently though.

Lots of the testing at the moment is very individual/organisational focused. Testing to help with individuals treatment or to assist a health facility to know if they have an outbreak. Not the bigger picture.  If these current and planned testing facilities are told to do 100k tests I suspect each one will end up pulling people in from different places to get the numbers up, a right mix making comparisons between areas difficult ,resulting in no meaningful overall data to identify hotspots. 

Obviously a warship is quite different to a cruise ship (bunk beds, no ensuite etc.)

Taking everything into account are the two environments really very different? My instinct is that they're not.

Yes and the other problem with antibody testing is the accuracy. Even 90% accuracy would mean that testing 1m people would leave 100,000 people misdiagnosed making a 'certificate policy' very difficult as the epidemic could be restarted by just a few thousand people with false positives. I think we need closer to 99% accuracy, but I don't know if that will be feasible ever.

I guess they are quite similar, but there are also important differences? Sleeping and toileting together must make it much easier for the virus to pass along?